Fred Seibert's Blog

Jerry Beck was the one who kindly asked me to write an introduction for his upcoming book on great art from Hanna-Barbera and how neat it was in our contemporary culture. And I asked you what I should write and you gave me some great ideas.

I’m really late with this essay and I have no idea whether it’ll even be accepted. But I wanted to say thanks and share it with you all.

The Coolest Job
By Fred Seibert

One of my proudest working days was when I became the President of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons in 1992. The coolest job at the coolest place.

When I first started traveling to LA in the late 70s I’d get a chill going past the Hanna-Barbera Cartoons building, wondering what kind of magic went on behind the imposing concrete screens. Just the studio name in plain black type up top screamed out to me. But my work had nothing to do with cartoons so there was really no reason to stop and go in. “I was a seven year old fan of Huckleberry Hound. Could you show me around your studio?”

Fifteen years later, in June 1990, I was at Universal Studios Florida on its opening day at the first Hanna-Barbera theme park ride. At the end of the ride they had a store, and I bought as much as I could hold, including a great watch. Months later, out to dinner with friend at a fancy restaurant, he asked “What’s that watch?” I said, “This is my Hanna Barbera watch; here’s Yogi, Scooby, Fred and the gang. What’s yours, a rolex?” My friend, Scott Sassa, was President of Turner Broadcasting and, fast-forwarding 18 months, he calls one day and says, “You know we just bought Hanna-Barbera. … You want to run it?” And I looked down and I had the same watch on. (It was 10:35am.)

We worked like hell to revive the magic and produce the greatest cartoons of a (new) generation. We plugged away almost as hard to make the building special. Painting it day-glo colors and putting up giant posters of the classic characters was a great rush. (Of course, that was before the neighborhood association threatened to sue, not to mention the purists in the building who wanted to keep the original post-office-beige color.) And searching the world for vintage toy collections of the company’s characters to decorate the offices was better than toys at Christmas.When Bill Hanna came into my office (originally his) and exclaimed, “Wow! It really looks like a cartoon studio now!” I knew I was in the right place.

If I was compiling a book like this to collect those feelings, Jerry Beck would be my first ten choices to do it. Here’s hoping his publisher will send over a case of them to share with family and friends.

(L)Mike Lazzo, originating programmer, Cartoon Network & (R) Joe Barbera

It was almost an accident I became president of the famous Hanna-Barbera studio, but it was a chance to revive cartoons through my idea of making shorts the way they did in the theatrical days.

Blog History of Frederator’s original cartoon shorts.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13.

Cartoon Network had just launched and senior creative executive and programmer Mike Lazzo had a great idea for a “Cartoon Advisory Board” really just a great excuse to hang with legends. He assembled a room somewhere in Hollywood with Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, Friz Freleng, Noel Blanc (Mel’s son), and John Kricfalusi. (…:::Later, Jerry Beck refreshes my recollections below in comments.) Mike had a bunch of questions he asked and they answered, but only one sticks in my mind. As I remember it went something like this:

Mike Lazzo: What makes a good producer?

Joe Barbera: Fred Quimby was a great producer!

(Note from FS: I knew Joe despised Quimby, so this confused me right off the bat.)

Quimby would come in around 10 in the morning, go right to his office and make some phone calls. Around 11 his barber would come in and give him his daily trim and shave. 12:30 he was off to lunch, back at 2:30 for some calls to East Coast distributors and then he’d go home.

Mike Lazzo: What was the production unit doing all day?

Joe Barbera: We were making the cartoons we felt like making. Like I said, Fred Quimby was a great producer!

I was listening closely. “Hey, I can do that job!” I said out loud.

(More next time.)

Blog History of Frederator’s original cartoon shorts.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13.

Over a year ago I started what I figured would be a quick round-up of how we got to where we are today in the short cartoon game. But with the launch of Channel Frederator in November things got a lot busier than I would have ever imagined. And we haven’t even gotten to the first short we made. So here’s the first six posts and we’ll pick up where we left off.

Blog History of Frederator’s original short cartoons.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.

Looking back on the first parts of this story and the almost 20 years since it started I realize we’ve mid-wifed almost 150 original short cartoons and over 1000 more their creators made when the shorts prospered as series. All in the face of an industry that to this day has virtually abandoned the short form which had made it rich (historians like Jerry Beck or Michael Barrier are in a better position to speculate why it happened). The obvious question would be why beat our heads against the wall so constantly when it might be easier to do what everyone else is doing?

To begin with when confronted with the idea of actually being involved with making cartoons I looked around to see what cartoons were the greatest ever. Not the best of the day (late 80s) but the best of all time. Like everyone else I’m a product of my past (I’m 54, so I started watching screens in the early 1950s) so my first exposure to cartoons was the shoveling of theatrical cartoons from the first half of the 20th century onto the fledgling medium of television. From Farmer Gray to Disney shorts, from Out of the Inkwell to Mighty Mouse I was in love with them all. But, of course, I mostly loved the Looney Tunes, which then and now, I thought were absolutely unparalleled. So the first seed of shorts addiction was in by 1960.

Like most people (though not most of this blog’s readers) I stopped watching cartoons regularly around 11 or 12 and graduated to pop music, propelled by the Beatles coming to America in 1964. So begins another devotion to a short form of popular culture, the Top 40. No matter where my musical travels have brought me, from art-rock through avant-garde jazz, the economy of pop from Benny Goodman to The Beatles to Nirvana has been, for me, the cornerstone of the one of the most inventive arts to have descended onto earth.

My initial instinct when asked about making cartoons was to make them like the ultimate, like Looney Tunes. Not that I thought we could ever equal them, and, of course, I had no idea how Looney Tunes were made; my initial thoughts, had they been implemented would have been abject failures. But when I met John Kricfalusi he gave me a quick tutorial on the primacy of the artist in cartooning, and with further discussions with Joe Barbera, Bill Hanna, Friz Freleng and others I decided that I would attempt to make cartoons primarily created by artists/animators/directors rather than writers or executives (not to ignore either, but rather, to put them in their appropriate place in the creative mix). And it seemed to me (still does) that a short form is a better form to start films with artists. Cartoons are more character based than story and plot driven, and rather than put artist/creators at disadvantage, the short form could allow the artist with character and story predilections to be at his or her strongest from the get go. Shorts seem like the ideal artist film medium.

So, from the beginning the wallop and the sense of the short form sat right with me. Let’s emulate the greatest ever and since the greatest were short (averaging around seven minutes), by golly, come hell or high water, that’s what we were going to do.

(More next time. Soon, I hope.)

Blog History of Frederator’s original short cartoons.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.